Art and Beyond(2)

Term:
Fall 2011

Subject Code:
GSOC

Course Number:
5068

What used to be considered the classical avant-garde has risen to acceptance and legitimacy with such success in reordering aesthetic vision that contemporary works adhering to earlier canons came to be rejected or sidelined. A brief review of how art styles such as cubism, fauvism, futurism, expressionism became classics, and like other art forms, such as music and dance, underwent revolutionary transformations: mixtures of new and ancient modes, dissonance, tone-rows, operas without arias, blending of popular forms with "serious," serves as a base for understanding the new challenges that art faces from changing institutional contexts and rapidly changing technologies. As a social construction that has provided symbolic supports for competing status groups, nation states, and artists, the arts face unprecedented global structures and processes that provoke creation, production, dissemination. Among other things, these force us to question whether the long held beliefs for the autonomy of individual artists and their creations are still viable.